XP not recognizing HD partition

[green3500]

Hoping to retrieve some data.

My Seagate 120GB SATA crashed. I had been having some instability with XP - freezes ups, slowing. I ran AV, Anti-Spyware and Anti-Adware. I did a repair (a few times over) and chkdsk told me it fixed some problems. I installed XP over the old without losing data, just Windows settings. Backed up my data, reinstalled, and then installed Windows updates. Was trying to update to SP2 and it crashed again. Had done a little more work that I had not gotten a chance to back up before it crashed - that's what I'm trying to save.

This time, the system won't recognize the partition/current drive, so I can't repair anything. I can't reinstall XP without reinstalling a whole new partition. I have a running WD40GB, but it will not boot with the second HD installed. I also tried to install the non-working HD to my kids' PC - won't boot up with XP there either. I get a black screen. When I run the repair console, I get a prompt but whenever I type in any commands, it tells me that the drive is invalid and will not let me do anything. When I tried to do a reinstall, it wanted to partition the drive again before anything else - which I didn't do.

How can I get XP to recognize the drive to retrieve my data? If I partition the drive again, it wipes everything clean.

Obviously, there's enough of XP left on the drive to keep any other drives from booting up with it attached. Is there anyway I can get rid of that without wiping the drive and my new data clean?

Is this a problem in the MBR? Will the SYSTEMROOT or FIXBOOT or FIXMBR commands do anything if it is not recognizing the drive?

Thanks for your help.
-Patti

AMD Athlon XP 1800, Seagate 120GB HD, Gigabyte K7Triton MB, 512MB DDR, NVidia GeForce 64Mb, WinXP w/SP1 (had been running SP2 until recently)

[green3500]

Oops, correction.

My Seagate 120GB is not Sata - it's IDE.

-Patti

[glc]

It sounds like the hard drive is physically failing. Download SeaTools Desktop from Seagate, make the bootdisks, and test the drive.

Are you saying that you put it in the kids machine as a second drive, and tried to boot to the kids drive, and it stalled the process? When you did this, did you rejumper the drives as required?

[green3500]

glc,

I have the drives on cable select, and I did swap positions, but I will try actually jumpering for primary and slave.

Could you answer the questions I had about the external USB please? How does that work and how costly is it? Is that something that could help in a situation like I have?

Thank you.
-Patti

[green3500]

It sounds like the hard drive is physically failing. Download SeaTools Desktop from Seagate, make the bootdisks, and test the drive.

Are you saying that you put it in the kids machine as a second drive, and tried to boot to the kids drive, and it stalled the process? When you did this, did you rejumper the drives as required?

glc,

Seagate tested but couldn't repair the errors. Looks like it has bad sectors. I can't even delete the partition and zero fill the drive. I'll be sending it back to Seagate.

My question now is what is a likely cause? A few months ago I was having XP problems, but I thought it was because of a bad cable. I swapped out IDE cables and the old cable fell apart when I removed it, and since it ran better after that, I thought it was the culprit. But in the last few weeks I've had crashes and freezeups, general slowing. I ran anti-spy/ad/AV programs. I scanned and defragged. None of those programs alerted me to bad sectors. I backed up data, reinstalled XP, and things were ok. But then it started over.

Most likely just physical damage that came with the HD that caused the crashes? How come I kept getting 'clean' scans?

I'd still like to know about that USB attachment, if you could elaborate a little.

Thanks.
-Patti

[glc]

Any hard drive can fail at any time, there is no point in even trying to determine the cause, it just *happens*.

A USB housing is used to take a standard IDE drive and use it externally. It can be handy, but it's no better than slaving the drive into another computer for what you want to do. If it's not seen properly that way, it's not going to be seen properly in the housing either.

The best luck I've ever had with trying to recover data off a damaged drive is with Spinrite, but the drive has to be seen by the bios. Spinrite runs off a floppy or CD boot, and should be the only drive connected in the machine. I had one the other day - a Western Digital that was exhibiting the same symptoms as you have. It took 42 hours to crunch through it - when it was done, it slaved into my bench and was seen no problem, in spite of a ton of bad sectors. Data recovery was simple.

Spinrite is commercial software, it's $79 I think. www.grc.com

This is the USB housing I use:

http://www.apricorn.com/product_details.php?ID=332

[green3500]

Thanks for your help, GLC

I re-ran the Seagate disk utilities a second time, and was finally able to delete the partition and re-partition it. So much for the data. At least I have the HD working again.

I guess my concern is now how stable is it? All the diagnostics I ran on it today showed no errors, but 9G of my 120GB showed up as 'used' as soon as I put XP back on. Is my HD seeing the bad sectors as used space, and not write to those portions? How stable is this HD likely to be?

I like the idea of the external USB HD housing. Makes it easier to swap out my extra HD for storage rather than opening the PC each time I want to access it. Thanks for the info!

-Patti

[glc]

What you need to do is boot with the XP CD, use the repair console, log in, and run CHKDSK /R - when it's done, the report should tell you if there are any bad sectors.

I would not trust it if it has bad sectors. All you did by reformatting it was lock out the bad sectors, and once a drive starts growing bad sectors, it will continue.

[green3500]

GLC,

Thanks. Looks like there are still bad sectors, and when Seagate ran their online diagnostics, they pretty much took me right to the RMA page :rolleyes:

I have an older 40 GB HD that I would like to use while I'm waiting for Seagate to send me a new one. What's the best way to 'merge' the two drives? I don't want to erase everything on that drive, but I would like to move some programs over to it, as well as data (what little I've collected this week!) Any suggestions?

Thanks again for your help.
-Patti